However one wonders if there's a pattern emerging. Ian Fogg, an analyst with Jupiter, details his own woes on his blog trying to get O2 (which supplied him with an iPhone 3G to test; he then bought one) to bill him properly for it.

Eventually he became so frustrated with it that he penned a letter to one of its higher-ups - which he also detailed on his blog. It's not an encouraging story.

Here's his litany:

Summary of the problem:-- Every month I receive an automated message saying there is a problem with my payment, please call.- Every month I call, speak to a customer care agent, provide my correct credit card details and the one-off payment goes through. I'm advised this won't happen again. But the same payment details fail when the bill is due for paying the following month!- At no point in time have I been able to view my bill on the O2 website - the login fails. Every month I'm advised this will be fixed and it isn't. Most recently, O2 customer care argued with me that the login was working when it simply wasn't, on three separate computers.- Every month I ask for a copy of my bill in the post, and it fails to arrive.- Last month O2 froze my account, as I was slow getting back due to business travel in the US.

So, the bottom line is:- I want to pay my bill.- I have never seen a copy of the bill, and yet have still paid o2 on trust on four occasions now.- I'm fed up with having to pay manually each month.- I'm fed up with wasting time each month on the phone with O2 customer care.

(Just to reiterate, those are Ian Fogg's experiences. I don't own or use an iPhone.)

More anecdata? Yes, possibly, though Fogg points out that experiences like this pose a danger for Apple - and thinks that it will be important for it to be able to move to availability across all carriers as soon as possible. That certainly chimes with my own thinking (much that it matters): it's better to be able to choose your service provider, and choose that on the basis of quality, than be tied.

But it's dangerous for the phone companies to think that because they've got a lock on a provider - and vice-versa - that people will tolerate poor service. People talk. Perhaps we should measure the quality of a phone network not by its coverage (they're all pretty much identical) or even price (almost identical), but on a public statement of how many people work for their customer service - and how many calls they receive?